I'm rather surprised Forbidden Kingdom is getting the reviews it is getting. I mean, better than 4/5? Really? Really?

Am I so much of an HK snob (I've never bought a single bootleg or turned off subtitles!) that even the pairing of these two greats wasn't enough to make the movie worth seeing a second time? I mean, the plot and dialogue were horrible! I like watching Jackie Chan stumble around as Drunken Master as much as anyone else, and seeing him and Jet Li go at it for 15 minutes was truly something to behold, but still ...

I dunno. It just seems like people are so busy salivating over the pairing that they forgot to pay attention to the movie.

I am aghast that The Dresden Files has been canceled, while Flash Gordon continues. Aghast, I tell you.

Can anyone who has read Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series tell me if the fantastically dumb ending of Ill Wind, the first book, gets any better in the second?

I really enjoyed the book for the first 330 pages ... then the last 5 pages were just plain horrible. Like, Agatha Christie let-me-introduce-the-murderer-you've-never-heard-of level of badness. The writing was otherwise good, so I am moderately tempted to shell out another $8 for the second book ... bot not if it just goes downhill from there.

Anyone?

What would be the implications if you woke up tomorrow and there was no News? No morning paper, no top-of-the-hour news on NPR, no CNN behind the bar at lunch, no evening news while you make dinner, and no news wrap-up for background noise while you get ready for bed.

What would the world be like? Would it be better, worse, or just different?

Your first reaction might be “but then how would I know what was going on in the world?”, but ... why do you need to know what is going on in the world? Can you, personally, do something about the War On Terror, or the earthquake in Peru, or the domestic dispute a few streets over? If you could actually do something, would you be getting your information from the TV or the paper, or through your job or some other more reliable means? Either way, does the News help you? Does it do anything more than make you feel like you make a difference when the truth is that you really don't?

How does it impact your life, personally, whether or not Don Imus gets back into radio?

You might start to worry about oversight. If the public isn't made aware that Big Bad Companies are doing Big Bad Things, which can surely only happen via the News, then they would just get away with it, right? Sorry, were you on the legal team prosecuting Enron? My bad.

Does watching the News do anything other than stoke your righteous indignation?

What if you decided to take a week off from the News? You could recycle your paper for a week. You could turn on the Discovery Channel while you get ready for work. You could ignore the CNN blaring during lunch and actually have meaningful discourse with your coworkers. On the ride home from work you could listen to music instead of NPR. And again at night, if you had to have the TV on, you could turn on G4 or a Knight Rider rerun or something. How would your life be affected?

It might mean that you miss out hearing about whom some random Asian country is beheading today. It might give you a little less to talk about around the water cooler -- but that might actually be a blessing in disguise, as you might feel like you got a bit more done than usual.

You'd just have to trust that the really important things would get to you eventually. If a gas tanker explodes on a freeway and shuts down traffic, it's not like you'll be allowed to obliviously drive through the pool of burning fuel, right?

NaNoWriMo progress graphs are up again this year:

This year I've given them their own domain: nowrists.com. Technically, it's short for Novel Writing Statistics, but given the amount of typing that NaNo calls for, I figured "nowrists" was fitting.

P.S. - If anyone is an aspiring artist and feels like contributing a design (SVG format only, please) I can add it to the choices. (Do give yourself credit on the design, of course.)

Update: added a dashboard version.

(I really need to re-rip my Keoki CDs. I miss my Keoki.)

My printed copy of my NaNo book arrived in the mail yesterday. Lulu.com is da bomb, yo. I had been in a pretty foul mood up until that point, but that completely turned it around. I've started reading it from the beginning and it turns out that it's not nearly as horrid and dull as I thought it was. I don't know that anyone but a complete geek or dork would enjoy it, but I think it's fun. It's weird holding it. I wrote an actual book. It's in my hands.

The Girl and my aunt both think I should pass them out for Christmas gifts in the most self-aggrandizing way possible. Now, I admit that I'm a dick, but I don't know if even I have the brass cojones to do something like that. And really, I doubt that more than one or two people in my entire extended family would even get into it. We'll see.

I've been going through the galley and redlining all of the typos and horrible grammar. I guess there aren't that many, especially as I was typing like a man on fire just to get it done. Now I just need to lighten up the colors on the cover a bit and it might actually grow up to be a real book!

Oh, and for all of you Daily Show fans, I present you with last night's Moment of Zen:

I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year. Being the geek that I am, I lose motivation easily and just need pretty things to keep me on track. So I came up with this:

Yay pretty graphics. Anyway, I put it up with instructions so that any NaNo participant could use it. But, I only put it up in one place and let it spread from there, just to see what would happen. Over the weekend I suddenly jumped from about a dozen people using it to about 50 90 right now. I've been perusing my referer logs and seeing where people are using it. That may be slightly evil, I know, but it's not like I'm selling anyone's info to telemarketers. It's just a harmless bit of ego-surfing, right?

When I went to a NaNo write-in this weekend, I got a bit of fanboyage off of it. Being fanboyed doesn't happen often for me, so it's still cool, but very very weird and creepy. About an hour into the write-in I realized how art-vs-life the whole situation is, because a major theme in my novel is the lengths the main character will go to to avoid being recognized and getting fanboyed, and about how no one thinks they're a rockstar.

So, yeah, that's about the most interesting thing to happen to me lately. Which is nice.

I did go see the Orlando Magic play the Cleveland Cavaliers last night. I'd never been to a basketball game before, as it's really not my kind of sport. It didn't suck. The first three quarters were rather bleh, but the last quarter and the overtime were fun. Turkoglu did well, and kept making 3-pointers, but looked like he could have used some caffeine in the fourth quarter. I don't own stock in Turkoglu, Inc or anything, he was just the player that stood out for me.

There are a few songs that just make my brain detach and go to its happy place. It's an instant visceral reaction, and it really weirds me out, but in a good way. Off the top of my head, and in no particular order:

• Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, "Cupid de Locke"
• The Crystal Method, Vegas, "Comin' Back"; Community Sevice, "No Soul"
• Timo Maas, Loud, "Help Me"
• Deftones, Deftones, "Minerva"